4 Ways to Empower Your Child

One of the Universal Truths is that we all want to love and be loved.
You have also most likely heard the saying, "you have to love yourself before you can love someone else". Sometimes this can be easier said than done right? Yet if we don't love ourselves, what happens to our most cherished relationships, especially those with our children? Some of us would never admit to anyone - especially ourselves - that we do not love and appreciate who we are.
Whether we have children or not, someone's child is watching us, so we have reason to think about how we might live and act responsibly. On some level - biological, spiritual, or social - we model our lives to young people. Just knowing what we can offer to others doesn't make it easy to model our lives to where we desire to be.

Unless we are willing to come to terms with our deepest and darkest secrets, and make peace inside ourselves, they stifle us.
It does not mean that we have to share our inner thoughts with anyone else, but that we have to be aware of the emotional and mental triggers that we have. We need to be aware of these mental and emotional triggers that these secrets cause and they ways in which they cause us to treat ourselves and others. A powerful, profound, and deeply personal realization is that behind the deepest part of us that we keep hidden - our secrets, the truth we keep running from - is our ultimate power and strength.
This includes the power and strength to be an effective parent.
According to best-selling author and featured expert Lisa Nichols, "Parents present 'the first example' of how the world will treat us; if we serve our children from an empty cup, we are doing them a disservice because we tend to be short with them and feel resentful. We become exhausted.

Most of all, we are poor examples of what they need to do when they grow up and become parents".

Having unconditional love and acceptance for ourselves is critical in how we inspire our lives and nurture our relationships.

Lisa discusses the following 4 important ways to empower your child and ultimately to strengthen your parenting power; Create safe spaces.
Practice no judgment by demonstrating consistent unconditional love.

The information which your children share with us should be used to encourage and support them instead of hurting them. Doing this allows us to have meaningful and insightful communication. Have possibility-based conversations. Next time you want to automatically react to something that your child has done, stop and think.
This allows you to identify whether you are speaking from a place of love or fear.

We must ask ourselves whether what we are about to say speaks for what we want for our child or whether it speaks for what we want our child to avoid.
Speaking to avoidance is speaking from a place of personal fear.

Talk less.
As parents we tend to talk way too much.
Lisa shares that, "We believe we need to impart to our children all the valuable wisdom it took us decades to attain.
Instead let's listen at least as much as we talk.

" This means asking more questions and being still to listen to the answers. Allow the experience with your child to be both a sharing and learning occasion.

Risk it all to gain it all.
When we are vulnerable, people usually connect to us at the core.

Yet we are often afraid to tell our children about the mistakes that we have made.

We want to protect them. But when we don't share our mistakes, we have opened the door for them to make the same ones. Risk as a parent requires us to trust our children at a new level without projecting our fears. We can choose to share who we are in order to expand our children's capacity to handle real-life situations and to give them the protection of being able to better deal with the realities of life. As parents and partners in relationships, it is essential for us to let go of shame, blame, and guilt as driving forces for our lives.
We have the ability to choose how we embrace our parental responsibility. By living from the inside-out we can recognize our fears and hurts, create a safe space for ourselves, talk less and listen more to ourselves and in turn become more in-tune with our children and others. We can enjoy the benefits of loving ourselves and allowing our cups to overflow with abundance which is available to ourselves and our children. In doing this, we give the true gift of ourselves as we create expectations and environments which empower our children to live their true lives.